😇 Advent 1

Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44.

Central Thesis/Theme: The Advent season inaugurates a new way of seeing humanity itself—the "son of man" as both ordinary human and harbinger of radical transformation. This first Sunday reintroduces the lectionary cycle not as institutional prescription but as framework for discovering what Scripture says when freed from calcified interpretation and enforcement of meaning.

Key Textual/Historical Insights: The Septuagint provides our earliest textual witness, predating the Masoretic text by centuries and representing what Jesus and the earliest Christian community likely read. Isaiah's "word of Yahweh" emanating from Jerusalem connects to John's Logos—divine communication that judges (convicts, brings to trial) rather than simply condemns. The Psalm's Hebrew root for "throne" (kisê/kasa) carries connotations of concealment, not Solomon's ostentatious throne room. Romans 13's "rulers" (al) signifies those who set standards and examples, distinct from those who lord over (radha). The "son of man" in Matthew echoes ben adam—child of earth, ordinary human—language Jesus employs to simultaneously claim and democratize messianic expectation.

Theological Argument: Advent announces something emerging from below, not imposed from above. Like the judges of Israel who arose charismatically in response to oppression, transformation comes through ordinary humanity when systems calcify. The Hebrew prophetic imagination offers "logic incarnate"—of course charlatans on thrones will be challenged, of course new language will route around enforced meanings, of course salvation comes through the unexpected.

Contemporary Application: Language belongs to the people, not to those who sell dictionaries and enforce definitions. When institutional interpretation becomes weaponized control, faith must be "federated"—distributed, accessible, belonging to the many rather than monopolized by the few. The Marshall hermeneutic reads Scripture as everyman/everywoman, privileging the grunt's perspective over the officer class, the scraps over the cool kids' table.

Questions Raised: How does beginning with the Septuagint rather than Masoretic text reshape our reading? What does it mean that Jesus identifies with "son of man"—ordinary humanity—rather than royal messianism? How do we distinguish between confidence and arrogance when claiming interpretive authority outside institutional ordination?

• Readings

  Isaiah 2

  1 The word which came to Isaiah the son of Amos concerning Judah, and concerning Jerusalem. 2 For in the last days the mountain of the Lord shall be glorious, and YHWH’s house shall be on the top of the mountains, and it shall be even higher than the hills; and All People shall come to it. 3 And People shall go and say, C’mon, let’s climb the mountain of YHWH, to the house of Jacob’s God(s); and they will tell us The Way, and we will walk in it: for Torah has come from that deserted place, and The Word of YHWH out of Jerusalem. 4 And s(he) shall ⚖️ judge All People, and shall convict People: and they’ll refashion their guns into plows, and their weapons into gardening tools: and People won’t point guns at each other, and they’ll no longer be fascinated by violence. 5 For now, O house of Jacob, c’mon, let’s walk in the light of the Lord.

  Psalm 121(122)

  1 I was glad when they said to me, Let’s go to YHWH’s house.

  2 Our feet stood in your home, O Jerusalem.

  3 Jerusalem is built as a city whose communion is genuine.

  4 For there the families went up, YHWH’s families, as an example for 🤼‍♀️ Israel, to give thanks to the name of YHWH.

  5 For there are set 🚽 thrones for judgment, even 🚽 thrones (K-S-H) for the house of David.

  6 Pray now for the peace of Jerusalem: and let true love come easy to you.

  7 Let peace, I pray, be within your property, and prosperity in your attics.

  8 For the sake of my family and my friends, I have spoken peace concerning you.

  9 Because of the house of YHWH (Gods), I have sought harmony.

  Romans 13

  11 Do this, knowing the time has come, like the dawn, to awaken from sleep, for ✝️ Salvation is now nearer to us than when we first believed. 12 it’s almost dawn, and the light is near. So let’s throw off last night’s mistakes, and let’s put on the armor of light. 13 Let’s walk properly, as if everyone can see us; not in partying and drunkenness, not in nakedness and boning, and not in strife and jealousy. 14 But put on the Lord Joshua Christ, and make no provision for carnality, for its bottomless appetite.

  Matthew 24

  36 “But no one knows of that day and hour, not even the messengers of heaven, but only my Father. 37 Like the days of Noah, that’s what Advent is like. 38 In those days, before the flood, they were having a good time, getting married and running businesses, until the day that Noah entered into the ship, 39 and they didn’t know. Then the flood came and took them all away, that’s what the new Humanity may look like. 40 Two dudes will be working outside: one will be taken and one will be left. 41 Two others will be at their cubicles: one will be taken and one will be left. 42 So be careful, cuz you don’t know when your time will come. 43 It’s like if the owner of a house had known when at night a thief was coming, they would have been on alert, and so their house wouldn’t be violated. 44 That’s why you should be on alert, because the so-called “Son of Man” will arrive in an hour that you don’t expect.

• Reflection

  Hello and welcome to Advent 1 of Year A, Matthew's year. This is Brother Logan Isaac, and you're listening to First Formation.

  Before I launch into this morning's reflections and why the reading was different than you might have in your own Bible, I wanted to welcome you to what I'm calling the reboot of First Formation. I've been doing First Formation and reading the lectionary for seven or eight years. I started not too long after our oldest was born, reading the dailies—the Monday through Saturday daily lectionary readings of the Revised Common Lectionary. Thank you, Vanderbilt Library, for making them accessible.

  I did that for three full years, an entire liturgical cycle. That really got me comfortable with the Bible and made me more curious about getting into what's behind the Bible—the stuff I don't always see myself but see through layers of interpretation.

  I speak American English as my native tongue, and that distinction matters. But I knew from a very young spiritual age that this was written in Greek and Hebrew, languages I don't speak natively. One of my first Bibles was a keyword study Bible with the Greek and Hebrew Strong's numbers. If you've read God is a Grunt—which I'm running out of hardcover copies of, though I'll be re-releasing it as a softcover—that was the first place where I really got into the Greek and Hebrew. I gave people resources to get into it themselves through BluLetterBible.org, which is what I use.

  I have this big Strong's Concordance with all the Greek and Hebrew roots, verbs, nouns, compound words. The more I dug into these foreign languages, the closer I got to God. By that I mean the more my curiosity was satisfied.

  When I got that keyword Bible at an evangelical mom-and-pop Bible store in Mililani on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, I prayed a prayer without really knowing it. The cashier—probably the owner, some older woman—said, "What do you want to engrave on your new Bible?" I didn't know. She said most people get their names.

  Something struck me: that's not important to me. If I lose this Bible, it would be great if someone else had it and used it and enjoyed it. I didn't want to put something personalized on it that would name it as mine.

  So I told her, "Let me think about it," and wandered around the store. Something came into my brain—and I say I prayed a prayer because my conception of God is such that I think God hears everything, is capable of hearing everything, even the unspoken prayers that go on in our hearts.

  I wasn't talking out loud—that's weird, people think you're crazy when you talk to yourself. But I was talking to myself, and in those quiet places, I know God heard me because I got this flash, this one sentence that I think irrevocably shaped the rest of my life to this point and therefore beyond.

  What I put on that Bible in gold leaf lettering was: "Lord, give me wonder, may wisdom follow."

  I asked God for curiosity and I got it. That's both a blessing and a curse—a curse because you can never satisfy curiosity. If you believe that curiosity killed the cat, you've been misled. A feeling is not going to kill you, much less curiosity of all feelings.

  No matter where my life has been, I've always been fascinated by the Bible. When I started doing First Formation, it gave me an outlet for that curiosity, and I got closer to this literature.

  After my first master's degree—an MTS from Duke—I got a job teaching the Bible to undergrads who probably didn't really want to be instructed on the Bible. They were going to a formerly Christian college where it was a requirement, and none of the tenured faculty wanted to deal with it. So I taught five semesters of Bible at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I walked my students every semester through the Jewish holidays and where they come from, Torah and the prophets, the gospels.

  I didn't really choose that—it just got put in my lap. I've never taken Greek or Hebrew.

  When I got ready to take my second master's degree at St. Andrews in Scotland, including some courses with Tom Wright, I was given the option of doing Bible and Scripture and Theology or Systematic and Historical Theology. The systematic stuff bored me to no end. But I figured the one class I'd have to take for the Bible track would be kind of boring because I'd already been teaching it, probably took it at Duke.

  So I took the course that led me to historical and systematics. In that class with Mark Elliott—a patristics scholar—and Tom Wright, we explored origins of Christian theology. We think of patristics, the fathers, as second and third century, when theology was hitting its stride. Tom's point to Mark and to us graduate students was: no, theology's happening right there in Paul before we even have the gospels. That's what theology looks like—Paul writing to communities. Later, those communities began to narrate the things they remember about Christ's life.

  That stuck with me.

  I came back, got in a lot of trouble with the wrong people—or the right people—and had a lot of time because I wasn't going to be an academic. I was a stay-at-home dad for eight years, and that's when I was doing First Formation. I was reading my Bible and Blue Letter Bible because I had the time. You've got to read something while you're trying to put the kids to sleep or waiting for them to go to sleep in their crib so you can low-crawl out or they'll wake up and start screaming.

  That began in 2018, seven years ago. I've done all of the dailies, all three years, the entire three-year cycle. I've been practicing getting up to the Sundays, because the Sundays are the cool kids' show. That's where all the best readings go. Me being a grunt, I'm happy with the scraps that fall off the table. So I did the dailies—the parts of the Bible, or at least in the lectionary, that nobody wants. Just like my Bible as Literature class—nobody wanted to teach the Bible as Literature to a bunch of reluctant undergrads. So I did it.

  That's the grunt in me. I'll take the work nobody else wants. You don't want to clean the bathroom at the chapter house? I'll do it.

  I'd never done the Sundays before. Yet I believe in myself and I believe in how I've been trained. I didn't take languages, but I took theology and ethics and interpretation, hermeneutics. Reading the Bible and giving however many seasons of First Formation made me comfortable in taking on the cool kids' Sunday readings.

  Year A is the beginning of a new three-year liturgical cycle. Year A is Matthew. I would really prefer to go Mark, Luke, Matthew, John, but that's not the way the calendar fell. I like piggybacking off of what an institution has already created. I'm not going to reinvent the lectionary. But it does provide me something outside myself to extrapolate and to apply my Marshall hermeneutic.

  If there's one thing PQ HQ dot com and Grunt Works is about, it's about applying a Marshall hermeneutic to our faith, to our current culture, our current politics. By Marshall hermeneutic, I mean interpreting it as an everyman or an everywoman. That's why "grunt" is really important to me.

  Grunt is a protected word in the infantry. I was not a grunt because I was artillery. Only 11 Bravos are grunts, and maybe 11 Charlies. The irony is that I stood in formation in Iraq when my infantry platoon got their combat infantrymen badges. Me and the medic were standing next to each other—we were being polite, but it was kind of funny. We didn't laugh out loud, but like, give me a break. We carry more stuff, are responsible for all of you, and we don't get the same credit.

  That was fine. The medics and I—that's our lot. We don't need the accolades. Call us the original or the last quiet professionals. I don't need it. I got a CAB, Combat Action Badge, like they told us when we got home, because my artillery unit put us in for one.

  I'm not here for the laurels, I'm not here for the accolades. Whenever I go skating and land something I'm proud of, I know people are tapping their skateboard for me. I'll exchange glances or whatever, but I've deliberately put that out of my mind because I'm worried about becoming arrogant.

  If you've interacted with me, a lot of people would say I'm arrogant. I think there's a very thin line between arrogance and confidence. Being worried about being arrogant can keep you from being confident.

  I've been putting off doing the Sundays for a long time because I'm not ordained. I never felt a call to ordination. I don't have languages. But I do think the Bible is saying something different than what I've heard other people tell me it says. It isn't necessarily the language that is at the heart of it. I think it's the culture. I think the people who have been telling me what the Bible says have something to lose if they find that it says something slightly different.

  There are a lot of anti-imperialists I've been in contact with who have formed my own interpretation of scripture, but that's not me. Not only was Cyrus, the emperor of Persia, called a Christ in the Old Testament in Isaiah—John and the Christ Joshua didn't see the same way. John was very anti-imperial. He sends his disciples from jail to ask his relative, "Are you really the Messiah?" Like, I just went to jail for you, and here you are healing a military family member's son. I thought we didn't do that. I thought we didn't associate with those people.

  The hermeneutic I've developed in my brain isn't exactly progressive and certainly not conservative. I got pushed out of the military because I refused to carry a weapon. I was artillery, but I was willing to deploy. I made it very clear, and they would not allow me to deploy without a weapon. They kicked me out with an honorable discharge.

  I am a person of many paradoxes.

  To get into today's readings and why I read what I did: I've taken the public domain translations for the Septuagint, which should be the starting point. It's the oldest text we have. The Hebrew text didn't come until the 900s.

  Part of the problem we don't always see as Christians is that the Masoretic text we base all of our English Bibles on—they were correcting. They came after the Septuagint. Before the Masoretes, the Hebrew Bible didn't contain any vowels, just consonants. You can imagine that in English—if there's a sentence or a paragraph or an entire book without vowels, you could probably read it, but there would be some flexibility.

  One of the trade-offs with the Masoretes is they took all these different Hebrew variations and said, "Okay, let's decide what vowels belong where and what these things are saying." The Greek Septuagint doesn't have that same issue.

  What I have done with my exegetical hermeneutic: when I look at the Hebrew Bible, I start with the Septuagint, because the Dead Sea Scrolls and almost everything points to the fact that the Greek text is what Jesus and the earliest Christian community had. I want to know what they were reading, and it was not the Masoretic text.

  Christ maybe, probably spoke Hebrew. He does preach at his own synagogue in Nazareth and reads. He would have been reading Hebrew probably. But if he's up in the north, it could have been Aramaic, could have been Greek. We don't really know for sure. But I want to be as close to Jesus as possible, as close to this individual whose Anglicized American name would be Joshua.

  I start with the Greek, and sometimes when I'm not clear, I'll reference the Hebrew, the JPS Hebrew Tanakh. But I start with the Greek.

  When I go through and read Isaiah, the word of Yahweh is what John later calls Jesus the Christ. The word coming out of Jerusalem is like a gentile like me saying, "Salvation comes from the Jews." It's inescapable. The Semitic roots that make up the Hebrew Bible are what give us the prophecies, the texts that make people anticipate a coming savior.

  That savior is not a king. I'll get into that another time. That's why I did not do a podcast episode for Christ the King Sunday last week. He's not a king. But he is a savior, and he is more closely associated with the judges of Israel than the kings.

  That's why it says, when the word of Yahweh comes out of Jerusalem, this word, Christ, will judge all people and shall convict people. In the Greek it's krinō, I think, which is to convict, to put someone on trial and to find them guilty or to be found guilty. The Christian language around "the spirit convicts"—you are guilty of something. You've made mistakes. When you realize you've made mistakes, you'll want to change your ways. You might stop using violence as much because that's a mistake. Coercive violence, because it's a mistake. It's hamartia, a sin—with scare quotes. It's a mistake.

  If you want to correct your mistakes, a rational person will correct their mistakes. They will metanoia, they will turn from their old ways. They will repent, which means acting in a way that doesn't look like the old way.

  When we get into the psalm, I changed things up. If you read this online at PQ HQ dot com slash—I have to decide on that—there are thrones for judgment. The Hebrew root is kise or kasa, and it means to conceal. So these thrones, which we think of as Solomon's big throne room, are actually—the Hebrew root is to conceal, like you're in a bathroom, that kind of throne.

  When we play with the language, when we remember that we get to play with the language, that language belongs to us—you can't enforce language or it's going to find another way around it. That's what pidgin, Hawaiian pidgin, different pidgins around the world like Creole—that is when a dominating system tries to tell a human community, "You don't get to talk that way. We own the language. We sell you dictionaries. You buy them, and by God, that's how you define your very existence, very perception of the world."

  And the word, the Christ, comes and says, "Oops, new meaning."

  When we get into Romans 13: "Be subject to the rulers above you." What do you mean by ruler? When you look into what the Hebrew polity once was, there's a difference between radah, which is to rule over, to lord over, to put people below you, and al, which is also a ruler, like you'd get in a schoolyard.

  What it means to be a ruler is to set the precedent, to be a standard, an example for all other humans to be able to follow. If you want people to follow you, you better be a decent human being. If you're not, you will not last long on that throne—which, by the way, are not passed down hereditarily, because with the judges it was not a child, there's not a genealogical system. That's what Gideon and Abimelech and Jotham tell us in Judges 9 and the bramble king, the first parable of the Old Testament.

  Finally, Matthew 24. We get to Advent. Advent is this coming. Advent is the beginning. The dark season for the Northern Hemisphere is the beginning of the liturgical year. There's more landmass in the north, so I take some solace in the fact that most humans reside in the Northern Hemisphere. This does get complicated if you live in Australia, South America, Southern Africa, India perhaps.

  Advent—the word in the Greek, the coming of the son of man. The son of man was a term that meant any old person, a child of humanity, ben adam. Adam means the earth. An earthling, a descendant of earthlings, just a regular person. But it gets inflated with all this meaning.

  Jesus, if he's fully human, if Joshua is fully human, he's walking around the northern tribal area of Israel saying, "I know what you mean when you say son of man. You might think it means me because I'm healing people. I'm doing miraculous things. I have a guru in my relative John, a prophet just like Elijah, who eats locusts like Elijah, who wears a belt and camel skin like Elijah. He has inaugurated me. He has begun my ministry by anointing me, by blessing me, by dipping me in the river—the same river where Naaman the Syrian is the first to be baptized, baptismos, in 2 Kings 5."

  This thing is coming. A new way to see the son of man, to see a child of humanity. A new way of humanity, a new humanity, a new age is upon us—whether that's because of AI or the printing press or fill in the blank.

  Something new is happening and all these crazy dumpster fire things are going on. That's just kind of how humanity works.

  In Judges, the people suffer under oppression. They are oppressed by the Philistines, fill in the blank, whatever you want. Some outside force is oppressing them. The saviors—yoshia—the first one is Othniel, then Shamgar, then Deborah. They just kind of emerge at the right time, and they do something charismatic and dangerous and sometimes violent, but not necessarily coercive violence. Not the top-down violence, but the bottom-up violence. I wouldn't call it class warfare unless, when you say warfare, you mean spiritual warfare, character battle.

  Something's coming through the Jews, through the Hebrew Bible, through the Hebraic imagination. The Semitic root is logic incarnate. Of course this is what happens. Of course, when we have charlatans on the throne, someone is going to find their way around the same old red tape and scare the powerful dipshits at the top who just want to hold onto power. Of course. Because that's how humanity works.

  If you take a moment and look at the Bible as a whole—which I've had the privilege of doing as a literate, privileged, hetero male evangelical—you begin to see things a little differently. You want to use new language than the language you've inherited, because the language you've inherited has become calcified and enforceable.

  First Formation is about a new thing happening, especially this next three years that I'm going to be doing First Formation. You'll see there's new logo art. If you've been listening for a while, there's a slight difference—mostly the same, little different. I'm going to be putting this right there on PQ HQ dot com slash first-formation. I might shorten that later. It might just be "formation."

  You'll find it on PQ HQ dot com. You'll see where you can follow the video podcast, the audio podcast. You'll get to read the same things that I just read, which may get updated. If you want to see the most up-to-date exegesis I'm doing, go to PQ HQ dot com slash TFW for The Fighting Word, because that's what I call my exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint and the Christian scriptures.

  Something is happening. I've been through a lot and yet I'm still ticking. I'm a child of humanity and I have a lot of privilege. What I want to do with that privilege is help other people find the satisfaction, the contentedness that I've been able to find, despite all the slings and arrows of all the entitled enemies I've encountered in the last 15 years, 25 years.

  First Formation is going to be my backbone, where everything else flows out of. I've been thinking about doing this anew for a long time, and I'm just going to do it. It's not going to be perfect, but I think it will be good—just like me. I'm made good. I'm imperfect, but I've been thinking about this a long time, and I am just dumbfounded at the beauty I'm still able to see.

  A lot of veterans, a lot of military families, a lot of just other Americans have been asking me for a long time how and why and what. I've tried to organize my thoughts and share them: God is a Grunt, Reborn on the 4th of July, Forgotten Country, in that order. I'm going to keep writing, I'm going to keep creating, I'm going to keep doing the thing I've always been doing.

  The only thing that's different is that I've definitely begun to see something that is breathtaking. It's also breathtaking to think I might have something of value that other people who are hurting in the kind of way I'm hurting or have been hurting—that I might have something to offer them. That I might be worthy. That I might be capable of inviting you to follow me.

  I learned from a friend, a companion on the way, how ironic it was that I was ready to give my life for freedom and democracy, but what scares me more than anything else is asking people to follow me, inviting people to follow me. The arrogance of thinking that I have something good and satisfying to share with the world.

  It might be confidence. Maybe I'm right. That's the only difference, after all, between confidence and arrogance: time. False confidence becomes arrogance. But if what I'm saying is true and good, then I'm just confident, and I need to trust that.

  This is First Formation, the first season of fullness. I don't know how many years I've been doing it, but this is going to be Season 1, Episode 1 of the real First Formation, because that's how I feel. I feel more capable than I've ever felt, and I'm not planning on dying anytime soon. I'm 100% disabled through the VA, so I have a lot of flexibility, a lot of privilege. What I want to do with that is share it with other people as much as possible.

  Listen to First Formation. Go to PQ HQ dot com. Come to the Chapter House. Buy one of my books. Join the conversation.

  Thank you for trusting me. Pray for me that I remain worthy and trustworthy. Pray for me that I remain trustworthy, because that's what I want. I want to remain as good a person as I can be, and I don't want to hide whatever gifts I have or value I have under a bushel.

  We live in an attention economy and a lot of people will think I'm just doing this for attention. But if I wanted attention, I could have had it a long time ago. I just had to get in bed with assholes, and I didn't want to.

  This is me doing the thing I think I've been called to do from the start. The only regret I have is waiting this long to do it.

  Thank you for following me.